Readers of Charles Hoy Fort or the Fortean Times will recognize the meme: mysterious fire or fires, a young girl, perhaps a maid or daughter of the household takes the blame. She was angry about being punished.

This article does not say the fire was a mystery--and it seems to have been the only fire--yet--but otherwise it is the same story as many articles collected by Fort.

Fort hypothesized, tongue firmly in cheek, that firestarting might have been a useful mental accomplishment in prehistoric times, the sort of thing which natural selection acts upon and promotes, but which has become an unnecessary strange talent since the invention of the Lucifer match and the tinder box.

But he seems to have been on to a sociological and psychological phenomenon at the very least by noting how many young women and girls, usually powerless, are accused in the event of an unexpected and unexplained fire.

Perhaps this is similar to the psychological and sociological structure of witch-hunting, where the powerless (especially children and women) are blamed for natural or accidental occurences such as fires in couchs.

Scapegoat or supernatural fire starter? Naughty little girl or victim taking the fall for an adult who was smoking on the couch earlier?

We will never know. But some truth is living on as an urban legend that crosses the centuries, leaving a trail of minor devestation behind.

One such incident noted by Fort occurred in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada. It was in 1886, in the home of the Hicks or Hickey family, IIRC. Mysterious little fires broke out all over the place in rooms that nobody was in, in curtains and furniture and piles of clothes or what not. Until a mysterious fire destroyed a near-by bridge and left a "ghost" simulacrum in the burnt wood, this is the Fortean incident that has hit closest to home for me, seeing as my family is all over New Brunswick and have lived in many towns and villages up and down the Saint John River valley since before the American Revolution.

Poor angry little girls. They may not all be guilty, they may not all have a supernatural fire-starting gift, but the press generally convicts them without a trial, even a witch trial.

This teache us the moral that the weak and female should accept whatever punishment is dealt out to them without complaint.

That's a Fortean story, but it is also Fark, somewhere in that Twilighty Zone place behind the Scary Door of the collective imagination. Personally, as a liberal, I suspect that the collective mind is often full of shiat.

But thank Heaven for little girls!

If civilization collapses, we may need them as fire-starters once again.

Readers of Charles Hoy Fort or the Fortean Times will recognize the meme: mysterious fire or fires, a young girl, perhaps a maid or daughter of the household takes the blame. She was angry about being punished.

This article does not say the fire was a mystery--and it seems to have been the only fire--yet--but otherwise it is the same story as many articles collected by Fort.

Fort hypothesized, tongue firmly in cheek, that firestarting might have been a useful mental accomplishment in prehistoric times, the sort of thing which natural selection acts upon and promotes, but which has become an unnecessary strange talent since the invention of the Lucifer match and the tinder box.

But he seems to have been on to a sociological and psychological phenomenon at the very least by noting how many young women and girls, usually powerless, are accused in the event of an unexpected and unexplained fire.

Perhaps this is similar to the psychological and sociological structure of witch-hunting, where the powerless (especially children and women) are blamed for natural or accidental occurences such as fires in couchs.

Scapegoat or supernatural fire starter? Naughty little girl or victim taking the fall for an adult who was smoking on the couch earlier?

We will never know. But some truth is living on as an urban legend that crosses the centuries, leaving a trail of minor devestation behind.

One such incident noted by Fort occurred in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada. It was in 1886, in the home of the Hicks or Hickey family, IIRC. Mysterious little fires broke out all over the place in rooms that nobody was in, in curtains and furniture and piles of clothes or what not. Until a mysterious fire destroyed a near-by bridge and left a "ghost" simulacrum in the burnt wood, this is the Fortean incident that has hit closest to home for me, seeing as my family is all over New Brunswick and have lived in many towns and villages up and down the Saint John River v ...